Holocaust savior’s story preserved

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Are people inherently good or evil? One ponders this question when viewing NO. 4 STREET OF MY LADY. While the Holocaust brought out some of the worst aspects of human nature, there were also individuals who showed great compassion.

Francisca Halamajowa was one such saint. The unassuming, middle-aged Polish Catholic woman and her daughter secretly hid 15 Jews for nearly two years — right under the noses of German soldiers who had turned their farmhouse at NO. 4 STREET OF MY LADY into a headquarters.

When Halamajowa died in 1960, her secret good deed might have died along with her. But Halamajowa’s heroic feat has been documented in Judy Maltz’s superb film, making its Boston area premiere on Sunday, February 28 at 11:15 a.m., at CinemaSalem. The Jewish Journal is sponsoring the screening.

Halamajowa lived in Sokal, a town in East Galicia (now part of Ukraine). Prior to World War II, 6,000 Jews called it home. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the Jews of Sokal were herded into a ghetto and life became oppressive. Sympathetic to their plight, the Aryan-looking Halamajowa smuggled supplies to them, and even offered to take in the baby daughter of her Jewish neighbor, Moshe Maltz.

Maltz didn’t give her the infant, but after watching more than 4,000 Jews from the ghetto progressively shipped off to the gas chambers, the desperate businessman snuck to Halamajowa’s house in the middle of the night in November 1942, and begged her to hide his family.

Halamajowa did not hesitate. In addition to the Maltz family, she also took in the Kindler and Letzter families — hiding a total of 15 Jews (including three children) in the cramped hayloft above her pigsty, and in a tiny space beneath the kitchen floor.

For 20 months she secretly fed them and removed their waste in buckets mixed with animal excrement. The Jews, acutely aware of the danger, spoke only in whispers and rarely ventured out of their nooks. Unbeknownst to them, in her attic Halamajowa was also sheltering a German soldier who had defected.

This unusual Holocaust story was preserved thanks to Moshe Maltz, who kept a detailed diary in Yiddish about his family’s experience. The journal included records listing names, places and streets. This gave his granddaughter Judy (one of the filmmakers, along with Penn State faculty colleagues Barbara Bird and Richie Sherman) the information required to craft the piece.

The heart of the film focuses on a reunion of the child survivors — now middle-aged — at No. 4 Street of My Lady. Chaim Maltz, Eli Kindler and the particularly affecting Fay Letzter Malkin revisit their painful past, sharing memories with two of Halamajowa’s grown granddaughters who never knew about their ancestor’s heroics.

Halamajowa’s blatant act of defiance during the war could have cost her her life, but she forged ahead because it was the right thing to do. Although she never sought acknowledgement for her actions, Yad Vashem named Halamajowa and her daughter, Helena, Righteous Among Nations in 1984.

When the war ended, only 30 of the 6,000 Jews of Sokal had survived. The Maltz, Kindler and Letzter families who lived (and their 120 descendants now scattered throughout the world) will be forever indebted to the courage of stalwart Halamajowa.